Free Color Picker Online

Part of Media tools: See all Media tools.

Quick steps

1. anywhere on the color spectrum panel to select a hue, or use…
2. Fine-tune the color using the brightness and opacity controls.
3. View the selected color's HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSV values displayed simultaneously.
4. any value to copy it to your clipboard.

Color Picker vs desktop software

Feature	Color Picker	Desktop software
Install required	No	Yes
Works on phone & desktop	Yes	Varies
Free to use	Yes	Often paid
Signup needed	No	Sometimes

People also ask

What is Color Picker?

Pick any color from a visual spectrum or enter a specific value to get its HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSV codes. Copy any color format to your clipboard instantly for use in design or code.

How to use Color Picker

1. Click anywhere on the color spectrum panel to select a hue, or use the hue and saturation sliders.
2. Fine-tune the color using the brightness and opacity controls.
3. View the selected color's HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSV values displayed simultaneously.
4. Click any value to copy it to your clipboard.

Why use this tool?

Quickly find the exact color you need and get it in any format for CSS, design software, or print work. This online color picker provides precise HEX, RGB, and HSL values without installing any software.

FAQ

Can I enter a HEX code to see the color?

Yes, type a HEX value directly into the input field and the picker will display the corresponding color with all other format values.

Does the picker support alpha/transparency?

Yes, an opacity slider lets you set alpha values. The RGBA and HSLA outputs include the transparency component.

What is the difference between HSL and HSV?

HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) and HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value/Brightness) are two models for describing color. HSL is common in CSS while HSV is used in design tools like Photoshop.

Can I pick a color from an image?

For extracting colors from images, use the Color From Image tool. This picker works with the visual spectrum and manual value entry.

Is this tool free?

Yes, completely free with no limitations.

Color Picker — In-Depth Guide

The color picker is an essential daily tool for web designers and front-end developers who need precise, accurate color values for their work. Whether you are carefully matching a brand color from an official style guide or creatively experimenting with new palette combinations, the ability to instantly convert between HEX, RGB, and HSL color formats saves significant time and reliably reduces errors when updating your CSS stylesheets, design files, and component libraries.

Graphic designers and visual artists use color pickers to ensure strict consistency across both digital and print assets throughout an entire project lifecycle. When a client provides a specific Pantone swatch reference or HEX value, this tool helps translate it accurately and reliably to whatever color model your particular design software requires. Keeping a detailed and organized record of all your project colors expressed in multiple formats prevents frustrating downstream mismatches and helps maintain brand consistency.

Accessibility-conscious developers and designers pick colors while carefully considering contrast ratios against various potential background colors to ensure inclusive design. Pair this tool with a dedicated contrast checker to verify that your chosen color combinations meet established WCAG accessibility guidelines. Aim for at least a 4.5 to 1 contrast ratio for normal body text and a minimum of 3 to 1 for large headings to keep your content comfortably readable for all users.

Content creators, social media managers, and marketing teams use color pickers to match brand colors precisely and consistently across multiple platforms and various media types. Extracting the exact color values from a company logo or existing brand asset ensures complete visual consistency in web banners, video thumbnails, and all promotional graphics. Save your most frequently used color values in an organized reference document or style guide for quick and convenient access in all future creative projects.

HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV — the same colour in different languages

A colour on a screen is three numbers: the amount of red, green, and blue light to emit from each pixel. Everything else — HEX strings, HSL wheels, Pantone swatches — is just a different way of writing those three numbers.

RGB gives the three numbers directly, each from 0 to 255. rgb(13, 148, 136) is 13 parts red, 148 parts green, 136 parts blue — the teal that runs through the GoToolsOnline brand. HEX is the same three numbers in hexadecimal, concatenated into a single string: #0d9488. HEX is pure shorthand — the six characters split into pairs (0d, 94, 88), each pair converts to one decimal 0–255, and you have RGB.

HSL and HSV reshuffle the same information into a form humans reason about more naturally: hue (where on the colour wheel), saturation (how vivid or grey), and lightness or value (how bright). For designers adjusting a palette by taste — "same colour, a little darker" or "same hue, less saturated" — HSL is far more intuitive than RGB. For compositing and colour-correction, RGB/HEX wins on precision. Both describe the identical screen colour; pick the representation that matches how you are thinking.

WCAG contrast ratios, explained without the acronyms

Text has to be readable. "Readable" is not an opinion — it is a measurable property based on the contrast between the text colour and its background. The ratio is computed from relative luminance (a perceptual brightness value, not raw RGB numbers) and ranges from 1.0 (same colour on same colour, invisible) to 21.0 (pure black on pure white, maximum contrast). WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, defines minimum ratios for three use cases.

Level AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 for body text (under 18pt regular or 14pt bold), and at least 3.0 for large text (18pt+ regular or 14pt+ bold). Level AAA raises the bar to 7.0 for body text and 4.5 for large text. Most commercial websites target AA for body text; sites with accessibility as a first-class concern target AAA where feasible.

The built-in contrast checker in this tool computes the ratio between any two colours you select and tells you which level each passes. A brand colour that fails AA on body text may still work on headings (large text) or on UI elements like buttons (where the 3.0 threshold applies). A colour that fails even 3.0 should not be used anywhere except large decorative elements. The ratio is the number; the level is a named threshold built on top.

Colour blindness, and why red-on-green is a trap

Roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of red-green colour blindness — deuteranomaly and protanomaly being the common variants. For a user with deuteranomaly, reds and greens of similar lightness are indistinguishable. The red "delete" button next to the green "save" button looks like two muddy brown buttons.

The fix is not to avoid red and green. The fix is to make colour one of several signals, not the only one. A delete button should be red and say "Delete" and be separated from the save button. A status indicator should use red and a shape (a cross vs a check) and a label. Colour is a nice-to-have redundancy; icon and text carry the signal.

A practical test: render your UI in greyscale and see if it still works. If the only way to tell two states apart was colour, greyscale flattens them into identical shapes, and you have just experienced what your colour-blind users experience every day. Most graphic editors have a proofing mode that simulates common colour-blindness types; use it during design review, not after launch.

Complementary, analogous, triadic: palette construction without guessing

Complementary palettes use two colours opposite each other on the wheel: blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple. They have maximum visual contrast — the pair pops — and are traditionally used for accent-on-neutral brand systems. Overused complementary palettes feel garish; the usual move is to desaturate one side heavily (a muted blue with a bright orange accent).

Analogous palettes use colours adjacent on the wheel: teal, green, and yellow-green, for example. They feel harmonious and unified, with less visual tension than complementary. They are the safe default for content-heavy sites and documents because nothing fights for attention.

Triadic palettes use three colours evenly spaced on the wheel: red, yellow, and blue; orange, green, and purple. They are vibrant and balanced, useful when you want playfulness without chaos. Children's brands and toy packaging lean triadic heavily.

Monochromatic palettes use shades of a single hue — different lightness and saturation at the same position on the wheel. They look elegant and professional, and they sidestep the entire "do these colours clash" problem. Many editorial and photography sites use monochromatic colour with one accent hue, which gives the visual punch of complementary without the risk of discord.

Dark mode is not just "invert everything"

Naive dark mode flips black text to white and white background to black. This works for roughly five minutes before the eyestrain shows up. The problem is that pure white on pure black is higher contrast than the human eye wants for long reading — the text appears to vibrate on the page, especially at small sizes, and the afterimages persist when you look away.

Good dark mode uses off-black for the background (around #1a1a1a or #121212) and off-white for the text (around #e8e8e8 or #dcdcdc). Contrast is still well above WCAG minimum, but the edges soften and prolonged reading is comfortable. Accent colours — brand teal, warning red, success green — need to be lightened for dark backgrounds; a colour that reads perfectly on white is often too dark to distinguish on off-black. The tool's contrast checker can tell you whether a light-mode colour still clears AA when moved to a dark-mode surface; often it does not, and the right answer is a lighter tinted variant of the same hue.

Screen, print, and the colour-space gap

Screens emit light in the sRGB colour space; printed output reflects light in the CMYK colour space. The two spaces do not cover exactly the same range of visible colour. Some vivid screen colours (pure digital cyan, neon magenta) are outside the CMYK printable gamut and appear desaturated or dull when printed. Conversely, some rich printed colours (certain warm yellows and rich reds) are difficult to reproduce exactly on screen without calibration.

For web and app work, sRGB is the only colour space you need to think about — it is what browsers render and what 99% of user devices display. For print work, the design is usually produced in a colour-managed tool that soft-proofs against the target print profile, so the designer can see roughly what the output will look like on paper. If you are picking a brand colour that needs to survive both digital and print, pick something solidly inside the intersection of the two gamuts — no electric neons, no pure saturated primaries.

Hex shorthand, alpha channels, and the common notation traps

CSS accepts several flavours of HEX. The six-character form (#0d9488) is familiar. The three-character shorthand (#abc) expands each digit — so #abc means #aabbcc, not #0a0b0c. That expansion trips up designers who want a darker shade and naively drop characters. The eight-character form (#0d9488ff) adds an alpha channel in the final two digits: ff is fully opaque, 00 is fully transparent, 80 is roughly 50% transparent. Browsers support all three, but older tools sometimes accept only the six-character form.

The CSS functional notation — rgb(13 148 136), hsl(175 83% 31%), hsl(175 83% 31% / 0.5) — is more readable for colours defined in code and supports alpha uniformly. Modern CSS has also added hwb() (hue, whiteness, blackness) and the perceptually uniform oklch() / lch(), which give more intuitive results when interpolating between colours. For a gradient, oklch transitions almost always look cleaner than equivalent rgb transitions, because linear changes in oklch correspond more closely to linear changes in perceived brightness.

Naming a colour, and why it matters later

When a brand or design system grows past a handful of colours, raw HEX values become unmaintainable. A style guide with twenty-eight unnamed HEX codes scattered across components inevitably produces inconsistency — a "primary" that is #0d9488 in one place and #0e9788 in another, a border grey that drifts across screens. The fix is semantic naming: --color-primary-500, --color-surface-raised, --color-text-muted. The HEX value lives in exactly one place (usually a CSS custom-property declaration or a design-token file), and every usage references the name. When the brand teal shifts by a hair next year, one edit updates the entire site.

The tool's "save" feature lets you pin colours as you pick them, which is a lightweight version of the same idea. For serious work, export the pinned values into your actual design token system — Tailwind config, Figma variables, whatever your team uses — so the colours move with your project rather than living in a forgotten tab.

Also try

Related tools that work well with this one:

• Color Contrast Checker
• Text to Speech
• Speech to Text
• Change GIF Speed
• Extract GIF Frames
• Reverse GIF